The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

In an interesting piece of synchronicity, just as the Lei
Zhengfu sex tape case turned the microscope on the political minefields that
Chinese reporters tiptoe through every day, the careful and circumspect work habits
of PRC journalists were also invoked by Tsinghua University professor Daniel
Bell in his response to a none-too-favorable profile of him by Mark MacKinnon
in the Globe and Mail.

Dr. Bell is a favored intellectual for the PRC regime
because he regards democracy as a relative rather than absolute good and thinks
China is doing better with a mixed system of single-party rule at the top and
some democratic rumblings down below.Dr. Bell’s views go beyond the Burkean advocacy of social stability
through elite rule (a strain recapitulated throughout the modern history of the
West) to the rather questionable assumption that the PRC government is a
high-functioning meritocracy, at least at the national level.

Dr. Bell is clearly not a favorite of Mr. MacKinnon, who did
a reasonably workmanlike job of depicting him as a clueless ass.

Bell clearly felt there should have been some more
back-and-forth on the profile, perhaps with an opportunity for rebuttal,
instead of MacKinnon interviewing him and then going off to juxtapose Bell’s
musings with some excoriating commentary from the neo-liberal quadrant characterizing
him as a regime apologist or worse.

In a reply on Huffington Post, Bell contrasted his handling
at the hands of Mr. MacKinnon with the apparently kid-glove treatment he
receives from PRC state media:

[T]here are some
advantages to the Chinese way of reporting news. When Chinese journalists
interview their subjects, they try to put forward a balanced account of what
the interviewees have to say, with emphasis on what can be learned and
communicated as something new and interesting. They rarely engage in
muckraking, public character assassination, or put on a smiling face then
betray their interviewees in print.

This rather Pollyannish take on Chinese journalism—Dr. Bell
is seemingly oblivious to the intense and continual pressure to conform to or
anticipate the news-management demands of editors, state, party, and/or any
bigshot with enough juice to pick up the phone or order a reporter beat up—is
not a persuasive rebuttal to a snide hatchet job by an unsympathetic reporter.

Unfortunately for Mr. MacKinnon, in the crude parlance of
the day, he fucked up.

Per Dr. Bell:

To be honest, I can
live with all these mistakes and misleading innuendos. It won't be the first
time interviewees have been victimized by muckraking journalists. What really
hurts me, however, is that MacKinnon chose to implicate my wife (he has not met
her). Before the article was published, I had forwarded an email from my wife
asking that her name be left out of the article, but he chose to ignore that
email.

MacKinnon writes that "Prof. Bell's well-kept house as well as his
background suggest his family is of the class he thinks should rule
China." The implication is that I defend rule by the rich because it's in
my class interest to do so. In fact, I do not think that rich people should rule
China. An important advantage of a well-functioning political meritocracy is
that it allows for upward (and downward) mobility based on ability and
morality, not class background.

But to press his vulgar Marxist argument, MacKinnon writes: "He met his
wife, Song Bing, at Oxford University in 1989, a time when only top students
with impeccable Communist credentials were allowed to leave China to
study." In fact, my wife is not a party member, and she left China in 1988
because she was awarded a merit-based scholarship by the Hong Kong based Swire
Corporation. At the time, my wife was an undergraduate at Peking University's
law faculy, and she was admitted to that university as a result of having
scored highly on the national university examinations in her home province of
Hunan. Perhaps MacKinnon was led to think that "impeccable Communist
credentials" played a role in helping my wife go abroad because my wife's
86 year old father was a local level communist cadre. Such "guilt by
family association" was typical in the Cultural Revolution and maybe
MacKinnon chose to borrow tactics from those days. In fact, the connection
exists only in MacKinnon's mind. Again, he could have checked this information,
but he chose not to.

Oops.

The Globe and Mail corrected the article:

“There is a morally legitimate model
of political rule that has more or less guided political reform over the last
two or three decades,” Prof. Bell said in an interview at his tidy home in
Shunyi, an upper-class suburb of the capital where he lives with his Chinese
wife, a senior executive at Goldman Sachs China, whose father fought for the
winning side in the Communist Revolution, and their teenage son.

Set across the street from Beijing’s
elite Dulwich College, Prof. Bell’s well-kept house as well as his background
suggest his family is of the class he thinks should rule China. He met his
wife, Song Bing, at Oxford University in 1988. She was there on a merit-based
scholarship from the Hong Kong-based Swire Corporation. The couple lived in
Singapore and Hong Kong before Prof. Bell was hired at Tsinghua in 2004, the
first foreign philosophy professor to join the university since the founding of
the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

I particularly enjoy the grudging flavor of “whose father
fought for the winning side in the Communist Revolution” and the retention of
the rather eye-popping editorializing of “Prof. Bell’s well kept house as well
as his background suggest his family is of the class he thinks should rule
China.”

Apparently somebody—and/or his editor—could not stomach the
idea of a thoroughgoing upgrade of these dismal paragraphs, because identifying
Song Bing’s father as simply a local cadre or, for that matter, dropping the
reference altogether, would have undercut the implication that anti-meritocratic
party favoritism explained Mdme. Song’s impressive resume and Dr. Bell’s
China-ruling taste in real estate.

In fact—gulp—the fact
that she won a merit scholarship to Oxford and then went on to become a
heavyweight at Goldman Sachs might imply that Professor Bell has evidence of
meritocracy in his own home!

What the heck.People make mistakes and don’t like to admit
them.I’m the same way.

Mr. MacKinnon’s voluminous Twitter feed understandably does
not include a shout-out along the lines of “Check it out!I had to retract some sloppy reporting!#Sorry
Song Bing!”

Instead, he primly links to a vociferous attack on Bell’s
Huffington Post article by David Bandurski of the Hong Kong Media Project.It slides past the central issue in Bell’s
piece—the dubious and undocumented innuendo concerning Mdme. Song’s bona fides—and tries to shift the
attention to discrediting Bell for his wide-eyed protestations about the Chinese
media.It is a hurried (hey, Mr.
Bandurski, the title of Bell’s piece isn’t “Freedom or Truth”, it’s “Freedom
Over Truth”; it’s right there in the screen shot you grabbed from the
Huffington Post) and not, to my jaundiced eye, a particularly effective piece
of Fisking.

Bandurski really gets lost in the woods by sneering that
Bell can’t even recognize the non-meritocratic nature of education at his own
university, Tsinghua:

In any case, it was the reading
suggested by the headline [about academic freedom] that caught the attention of
many Chinese academics at the time, prompting a bit of chatter and no doubt
some eye rolling as well. China had just had a number of rather high-profile
incidents underscoring problems in Chinese higher education. They all boiled
down to a system that was not, cringe, merit-based.

In 2005 world-renowned artist Chen
Danqing had resigned from Tsinghua in disgust over the unnecessarily rigid (not
rigorous, mind you) screening system for student recruitment and academic
qualification. Chen saw the system as antagonistic to talent. Right on the
heels of Chen Danqing’s resignation from Tsinghua, prominent Peking University
legal scholar He Weifang penned an open
letter announcing that he would refuse to accept master’s degree students
for the 2006 academic year. Why? Because the admissions process was
fundamentally flawed, he said, and many of the brightest students were not
being admitted because of needless and fussy requirements.

Needless, fussy, rigid?Maybe.Relying on punishing
entrance exams that weed out people who don’t test well but could succeed and
excel?For sure.

But people who get into Tsinghua are smart.Full stop.Quite possibly, the reason for Prof. Bell’s idiosyncratic views on the
meritocratic character of Chinese institutions is because he is in the
privileged position of working with the best and brightest at one of the most
meritocratic outfits in China.

In Mr. Bandurski’s effort to take down Bell, he reprints a
China Youth Daily profile of Bell, one that Bell undoubtedly found infinitely
more pleasing than MacKinnon’s (sample: Some
students compliment him on his handsome looks, and unlike Westerners he doesn’t
shrug nonchalantly and say, “Thank you.” He casts his eyes down, lowers his
head and says, “Oh, it’s nothing” (哪里，哪里).

It provides some interesting information on Bell’s time in
Singapore, which perhaps molded his optimistic outlook on single-party
elitist/meritocratic governance, as well as an acceptance of political oversight:

“When I was teaching
at the National University of Singapore, the department head there was a member
of the ruling People’s Action Party. After he was replaced, the new department
head wanted to see my list of readings, and he said I should speak more about
communitarianism and less about John Stuart Mill (a representative figure of
liberalism – reporter’s note). When I spoke about politically sensitive
material such as Marxist ideas, a number of special people would appear in the
classroom. When I used [Singapore’s] domestic politics to make my points, the
students would keep quiet. For that reason, when my contract wasn’t renewed
after it terminated there was nothing strange about it.”

It’s an awful thing to say, I guess, but you get a more
useful perspective on Bell and his ideas from the China Youth Daily puff piece
than you do from MacKinnon’s profile.Wonder what that means.

The incomparable Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth turned
his critical eye on the webstorm surrounding the Lei Zhengfu sex tape and
posted a notice that the girl depicted in the various pictorial pastiches being
circulated (such as the “Lei Zhengfu as Jabba the Hutt” japery I posted on a
couple days back) is not the girl in the tape.She’s a student in Xiamen who has nothing to do with the shenanigans in
Chongqing and is understandably miffed at the underserved notoriety she has
achieved, apparently at the hands of some blogger in China who chose random
pictures of a pretty girl to bookend with Lei’s sluglike visage.

ESWN also translated and posted the translation of a web
posting by a journalist, “Mr. Gui Xi”, who had first look at the video butgot scooped by Ji Xiguang, allegedly a
hyper-aggressive and morally flexible freelancer who ran with the story, spiked
it in the endzone, and acquired 300,000 followers on his microblog account
while Mr. Gui Xi was left on the sidelines to contemplate the meager rewards of
ethical journalism.

A few points of interest here.

Mr. Gui Xi provides no further insight on how the “People’s
Supervisory Network”—apparently some kind of whistleblower site—got the tape
from somebody inside the Chongqing police apparatus.

But he does paint an interesting picture of how this
particular PRC journalist deals with dicy stories that involve government
officials.It involves a careful probing
for corroboration, cautious discussions with the editor, and anxious approaches
to the local authorities:

In the afternoon of November 20, I began
interviewing for confirmation. I called up Lei Zhengfu. He said
"No such thing" and denied it. I called up the Chongqing City
Communist Party Disciplinary Committee, and they said that they were not aware
of any sex videos. But they have an Internet monitoring department, and
if they come across such information, they would initiate an
investigation. They also asked me to provide them with the contact
information for the People's Supervisory Network.

That evening, I wrote the report . But my bosses felt that the case
cannot be so simple and that there must be some ulterior motive for leaking the
video, so the story was suppressed for a day until more information is obtained
the next day. In retrospect, there was a story behind and the decision
not to publish on the first day was correct.

…

As mentioned before, I had provided the
Chongqing City Communist Party Disciplinary Committee with the contact
information of the People's Supervisory Network on November 20. The next
day, November 21, I contacted them again. They said that their Internet
monitoring department had seen the Internet post on the evening of November 20,
and their leaders have immediately initiated the process to investigate.

I remembered that as soon as I identified
myself, the worker on the other side immediately said: "After you spoke to
me yesterday, I immediately informed the operations department. When they
saw the Internet post, they immediately informed the leaders. The leaders
took it seriously and immediately initiated the investigation."

…

Zhu Ruifeng [the source at People’s
Supervisory Network] thought that based upon his past experience, it would take
at most one week to bring Lei Zhengfu down by releasing the indecent video.

He said that he sought out a reporter to
share the material on November 20 out of timing considerations. The
Eighteenth Chinese Communist Party Congress was just over, so there are fewer
restraints on public opinion. On the morning of November 20, Sun Zhengcai
was just named as the Chongqing City Communist Party Secretary. "New
officials need accomplishments on the job!" Once the indecent video
gets shown, the principal will become a target.In retrospect, the Chongqing City Communist
Party Disciplinary Party acted even faster than expected, and Lei Zhengfu was
dismissed within three days.

Clearly, it's open season on Lei and the new municipal bosses are using his saucy antics to draw a bright line between the bad old days of Bo Xilai and the new, squeaky-clean regime in Chongqing.

Global Times interviewed Zhu Ruifeng, who reiterated that he
didn’t want to get involved in any pre-party congress boat-rocking.But his source, identified as an officer
inside the Chongqing public security apparatus, told him:

‘我就是因为马上要开十八大了，才要举报。因为可能纪委书记都要换了，新的领导班子要成立了，我得扳倒一个贪官。"

“The very reason I want to get this in the papers is because
of the 18th Party Congress.It’s possible that all the secretaries of the [Party] discipline
committees will be changed and new leadership groups set up.I have to take down a corrupt official.”

Zhu says his source’s motives are unknown.Maybe he wanted to ingratiate himself with
the new bosses (or become one himself).

According to Zhu, he got the e-mail with the video on
November 4 and called up Liu Zhengfu the next day:

“Lei had headed the propaganda bureau in Changshou County
and understood the interview process.He
told me, if you want an interview, first send me the materials.”

After receiving the materials, Lei denounced them as
forgeries and stonewalled Zhu.Zhu (and
apparently Ji Xuguang and “Mr. Gui Xi”) subsequently received a call from the
owner of a Karaoke TV bar in Beijing who identified himself as Lei’s cousin
and, we can presume, tried to manage the problem with some combination of
threats and inducements.

While reaching out to Zhu through intermediaries, Lei also
set up a special team to try to figure out who leaked the video, without
success (must have been an interesting kickoff meeting: “Hey, you know that
video of me having sex with that 18 year old girl?...).

The interesting and complicating element in the story that Wang
Lijun, the-disgraced-top-cop-under-disgraced-Chongqing-mayor Bo Xilai had
already received the video and investigated Lei a couple years ago; the
businessman and the girl were jailed and have already served their time and been released.According to the article, Lei had approached
the municipal leadership and apologized for his error.

One can assume, therefore, that Lei had already been on the
receiving end of whatever censure, discipline, or amused sniggering the party
deemed appropriate, the tape was evidence in a closed case whose release was
embarrassing and unnecessary, and in 2012 Lei was at liberty to pursue an
investigation of whoever had committed the punishable infraction of leaking the
infamous video.

However, events overcame him.

On November 20, a citywide cadre meeting was held to effect
the personnel changes mandated for Chongqing by the Party center and fine words
were spoken by the municipal party secretary concerning integrity in public
service.Zhu characterized this policy
statement as a “great gift” that took a load off his mind, and he began
approaching media outlets with the tape and the story.Within 63 or 71 hours, depending on how you
count it (and the Chinese blogosphere keeps close track of how long it takes to
collect an official scalp), the municipal government’s news office announced
that Lei was under investigation.

The rather ironic thing is that Lei was already investigated
during the Wang Lijun era and, subsequent to the investigation, had been
promoted to the rather important position of municipal district party
secretary.It isn’t clear that the
construction company that arranged the woman (and the special spycam in a
handbag) successfully bribed or blackmailed Lei.So far, at least, his crime consists of getting
caught on tape horndogging while looking ridiculous (Global Times provided the
interesting but seemingly gratuitous testimony that, of the 80 minutes of
video, only 36 seconds showed Lei having sex).

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

[This post originally appeared at Asia Times Online on Nov. 22, 2012. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]

President Barack Obama's first post -
election mission is a trip to Southeast Asia -
Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia - to affirm his
signature diplomatic and strategic initiative, the
pivot to Asia.

Despite concerted hosannas
in the Western press, President Obama's trip was
overshadowed - perhaps intentionally - by Israel
pitching Gaza back into the meat grinder and
drawing attention back to the Middle East, a
region that the Obama administration is nakedly
and desperately eager to abandon.

In Asia,
Obama will find a different set of problems, ones
that have a lot to do with the United States
attempts to assert a leading role in the region by
leveraging its military presence - despite the fact
that the region is remarkably
peaceful, especially compared to that previous
beneficiary of heightened US military attention,
the Middle East - and arguing for the centrality
of its role as regional economic hegemon - despite
the fact the only contribution that the United
States has made to the Asian economy in the last
five years was a negative one, as it drove the
global financial system off a cliff in 2007 -
2008.

Objectively, US claims of "global
leadership," particularly in Asia, have a peculiar
taste:

Population of Asia: 4.16
billion
Population of the United States: 311
million
Asian tradition of great urban
civilizations: 2,500 years
US tradition of
great urban civilization: 150 years
US share of
GDP, 2011: 25.9%, expected to hold steady or
increase somewhat by 2050
Asian share of GDP,
2011: 26.9%, projected to exceed 50% by
2050

On the quantitative side, there
are still 711 billion reasons for Asia to pay
attention to the United States:

However, even this
dominant military position will erode as the
world's developing economies channel some of their
wealth into control over their own security
destinies; one estimate predicts the US share of
global defense spending will drop from 41% to 30%
over the next few years. [2]

As its share
of the global economy shrinks, the United States
is relying more on qualitative claims of its moral
stature as practitioner and promoter of democracy,
open markets, and free speech - rather than
quantitative claims that it holds the balance of
economic and military power in its hands.

But the United States is not in refocusing
on Asia for the moral satisfaction of promoting
democracy, or even the intangible psychic benefits
of protecting its brown and yellow brothers in
Asia from themselves with its benevolent military
might. As shown by the bloody path of human
catastrophe that the United States has created and
enabled in the Middle East, the United States'
foreign relations are not driven by a compulsion
to impose democracy or open economies.

The
Asian game - the expenditure of military, moral,
and diplomatic capital - is worth the candle to
the United States because of the increasing
importance of Asia to world trade.

Or, to
put it in less American - centric terms, the
center of world trade is shifting to Asia and away
from the "Atlantic Powers", ie Europe and the
United States.

Even today, the United
States, thanks to its immense and structural
fiscal deficits, is no longer able leverage its
GDP advantage to act as the world's demand engine
and call the economic shots in Asia. Instead, the
United States wants to weaken its currency and
increase exports to Asia, challenging the export -
driven model that has driven the rise of Japan,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.

Unsurprisingly, given these liabilities,
it is time for America to whip out the secret
sauce of freedom promotion in order to claim a
unique moral authority to set the Asian agenda.
And to create a compelling freedom narrative, a
compelling anti - freedom bogeyman is required.

In other words, enter China.

The
dirty secret of the US pivot to Asia is that it
requires tension, polarization, and a zero sum
antagonist. In other words, it needs China to
justify a destabilizing US presence in the region.

I believe it is an accurate
characterization of the aims of the Chinese
leadership that it would happily live the next 30
years of its existence as it lived the past 30
years: amorally free-riding on debt-fueled US
demand and the US security regime in East Asia,
until the US consumes itself in a fiscal bonfire
and leaves China as the last East Asian power
standing, without a single shot fired in anger.

Now, for national and domestic reasons,
the United States is trying to change the rules of
the game.

It is a credit to the tunnel
vision of Western pundits that the destabilizing
consequences of a major, publicly announced, US
strategic reemphasis on Asia - the famous "pivot"
- is ignored in favor of a narrative that paints
China's continued focus on business as usual -
success in economic growth - as the "China rising"
threat to Asian stability.

One can either
believe that the United States is selflessly
injecting itself into the South China Sea disputes
in order to protect the right of smaller Asian
nations to argue with the PRC over worthless rocks
and protect "freedom of navigation and commerce"
(even though the vast majority of traffic through
the South China Sea is going to and from PRC
ports)... or one might perceive a concerted US
effort to wrench the Asian economic focus away
from the PRC and toward the United States by
polarizing Asia into pro-US vs pro-China camps.

If you voted for the economic argument,
well, the Obama administration agrees with you.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

[Update: the girl shown in the photo is merely a random image; Chinese media reported she is a university student in Xiamen and she has nothing to do with Lei Zhengfu. My apologies. Further details on the Lei case here.]

Alexa Olesen of Associated Press wrote a piece on the Lei
Zhengfu sex tape.Fine article.

A more accurate title should be: Sex tape used to blackmail
Chinese official goes viral.

I guess the genius at AP who tacks the titles on these
things decided that “Chinese official as victim of blackmail scheme” did not adequately
reinforce the “Chinese officials are corrupt” meme and decided to come up with
something that fits better with the current zeitgeist.

He could have gone with “Sex bribery of Chinese official
turns out to be sex tape blackmail” but that doesn’t scan too well.

How about “Tatooine Council Cans Jabba the Hut Over Princess
Leia Sex Tape”?

It is a source of great puzzlement and distress to me that
the interwebs have not yet generated a photoshopped depiction of this striking
image.I’m a busy man, so this is the
best I could find:

Actually, a headline that conveys the true context of the
episode would be “PRC Leadership Piggybacks Anti-Corruption Drive on Top of
Chongqing/Bo Xilai Purge”.

Hmmm…piggyback.

The Lei Zhengfu sex tape is actually a significant story,
primarily because the government let the expose happen.

In the coming weeks, I think “correcting abuses in Chongqing”
will be used as a convenient jumping off point for a variety of central
government reform initiatives that are actually intended to be national in
scope.Instead of challenging the strongest,
most entrenched governmental/party/SOE interests at the center or in the
provinces, the CCP leadership will be going after the weakest, most discredited
elements of the decimated Chongqing power structure first.

Perhaps the example of Lei Zhengfu’s public humiliation and the
demonstration of the power of China’s web and media to drive the national discourse is meant to show the economic and political powers that be that Xi Jinping
& Co. possess an effective tool to overcome institutional resistance to the
expansion of their rule and policies both in the center and at the
provincial/municipal level.

It’s an interesting story.Wonder who’ll cover it.And who
will write the headlines?

Monday, November 19, 2012

[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on November 17, 2012. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]

According to Russia's TASS news
agency, a grim milestone was achieved in Syria a
few days ago: several peaceful demonstrators in
Aleppo were massacred. [1] The twist is that the
demonstrators were calling for protection by the
Syrian army to end the destruction of the city;
they were shot by insurgents.

A single,
thinly sourced news item is not needed to
demonstrate the profound moral and strategic
disarray afflicting the Syrian insurrection as the
country totters toward collapse. A handier and
more reliable reference point is the abrupt and
forcible reorganization of the overseas Syrian
opposition at the behest of the United States.

The Syrian National Council (SNC) is now
just a junior partner in a broader opposition
grouping, the "Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and
Revolutionary Forces" (SNCORF). Reportedly, this
new group was formed at the insistence of US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is
retiring in a few weeks and apparently wished to
pull the plug on the ineffectual SNC and replace
it with something less overtly Sunni/Muslim
Brotherhood-esque. The SNC's major sponsor, Qatar,
and the great minds at the Doha branch of the
Brookings Institute responded with the marvel that
is SNCORF.

SNCORF is striving for
rainbow-coalition inclusiveness. The big tent
includes secularists, Christians, Alawites, and
women - and also 22 SNC/Muslim Brotherhood
holdovers - but, for the time being, no Kurds.
Also, none of the Western reporting indicated that
representatives of the most inclusive and
legitimate in-country opposition, the National
Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, led
by Hassan Abdul Azim, attended the meeting.

In an attempt to have its communal cake
and eat it too, SNCORF announced that this
inclusive grouping would be headed by a Sunni
cleric, an ex-imam of the Umayyad Mosque, one
Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, who appeared in a suit and
tie to advertise, if not his secularism, his
secular-friendly taste in attire.

A
throwback in a suit
Judging from the
comments of Asad Abu Khalil , the acerbic "Angry
Arab" observer of Middle East shenanigans, the
motto for SNCORF and America's Syria policy may
well turn out to be "Reorganize in Haste ...
Repent at Leisure".

Abu Khalil reported on
several interesting items he gleaned from
al-Khatib's web postings:

I spent last night reading the
writings of ... Ahmad Ma'adh Al-Khatib: a clear
follower of the Muslim Brotherhood and a
disciple of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi [an important
theological mentor to Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood]. He has many views that his Western
sponsors did not know about. Take his treatise
on masturbation here: he maintains that this
"sinister habit" causes tuberculosis and tears
down the flesh.

Here, Mr Ahmad Ma'adh
Al-Khatib calls for Jihad to rescue the ummah
[the posting referred to now appears to be
inaccessible]. Enjoy him, please, especially
those in Western governments which approved him
and promoted him without reading a word of his
writings.

I am sure that the US Zionists
who approved the appointment of Mr Al-Khatib as
head of the exile Syrian opposition did not know
that he referred to Zionism as a "cancerous
racist movement."

Mr Ma'adh Al-Khatib
says here [see above note on access to the
posting] that Saddam has virtues among them:
"that he terrified the Jews".

This kook
(who could not have been appointed to the
position of preacher in the Mosque of the
Umayyads in Damascus without the approval of the
Syrian regime intelligence apparatus) here
declares that Facebook is a US-Israeli
intelligence plot. Read to believe. [2]

Good luck, Secretary Clinton, with
that Syrian opposition re-boot.

There was,
perhaps, a more significant element to this
reorganization that was largely overlooked - the
relative absence of Saudi Arabia at SNCORF's
coming-out party. The meeting in Doha was
orchestrated by the United States, Turkey, and
Qatar. Qatar's prime minister keynoted the opening
session and "presided" over the expanded meeting
of the Syrian opposition. [3]

Apparently,
no Saudi Arabian heavyweight attended. That is
significant because the reorganization of the
Syrian overseas opposition was a reaction against
the inadequacies of the Qatar-backed SNC, but also
a response to the crisis caused by the mushrooming
influence of Saudi-funded jihadis inside Syria.

Foreign efforts to support the
insurrection had largely turned into directionless
dithering, thanks in large part to Western
unwillingness to validate and empower the
expatriate and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated SNC
with significant amounts of arms. Saudi Arabian
Salafists displayed no such qualms about
dispatching arms and jihadis to Syria, with the
result that extremists have filled the
revolutionary vacuum.

News coverage of the
uprising now often includes reporting on gruesome
atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, the
occasional raising of the al-Qaeda flag, and the
profound weariness and disgust Syrian citizens are
expressing against the insurrectionists as well as
the government. With blowback into Lebanon and
Turkey, and Israel now firing on Syrian armor, the
situation is generally acknowledged to be getting
out of hand - and the SNC, never much more than a
stalking horse for the Muslim Brotherhood and a
convenient propaganda front for the foreign powers
seeking to unseat Bashar al-Assad, is definitely
not the group needed to bring order out of the
chaos.

SNCORF, with its Muslim Brotherhood
component sufficiently diluted (or, if you prefer,
with its internal politics now satisfactorily
factionalized so that the US and Europe can expect
to exert a controlling influence on its policies
and actions), is being positioned as a suitable
and properly vetted vehicle for formal recognition
of the Syrian opposition as a government-in-exile
and conduit for foreign military aid.

SNCORF might best be regarded not so much
as an attempt to level the playing field with
al-Assad as an initiative to level the playing
field with the Salafist jihadis who have been
filling the power vacuum created by the civil war
in Syria.

Can the reach of the Salafist
jihadis on the battlefield be rolled back so Syria
can enter the liberal democratic nirvana promised
by the West? The Syrian toothpaste is pretty much
out of the tube, Syria appears headed for national
collapse, and it is open to question whether
SNCORF, even with the superpowers bestowed upon it
by its inclusiveness, democratic aspirations,
loving coverage in the Guardian, and Western and
Gulf Cooperation Council diplomatic and military
support, can bring peace and unity back to the
torn and bloody nation.

Death squads
missing from action
SNCORF has its work cut
out for it, and it's worth wondering if Syria's
emigres and dissidents - characterized as
"reliable technocrats", not "insurrectionists with
fists of iron" - can tear the leading role on the
Syrian battlefield away from the jihadis and the
local bandits, bullies, and heroes who make up the
Free Syrian Army and the multitudes of local
anti-government militias.

There is one
remedy for Islamic extremist insurgencies that is
perceived as extremely effective by its US
practitioners but is unfortunately out of reach of
SNCORF, at least for the time being: death squads.
Syria is now at a point similar to that of Iraq in
2006 - a Sunni insurrection has fought the central
authority to a standstill, but at the cost of
Salafist extremists hijacking local power.

In Iraq, the Sunni opposition to the US
occupation eventually fractured as Sunni tribal
leaders, threatened by the bloody-minded ambition
of their jihadi allies and incentivized by US
money, arms and protection, set aside their
anti-American, anti-Shi'ite, and anti-Iran
sentiments, at least for the time being, turned on
the jihadis and cleansed Iraq's Sunni heartland -
Anbar Province - of al-Qaeda militants.

The BBC provides some context of this
event, the "Anbar Awakening", describing a
situation that looks a lot like today's Syria:

But by 2006, in one of the many
unintended consequences of the invasion, foreign
fighters such as the Jordanian Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, who had pledged themselves to
al-Qaeda and received funding directly from
Osama Bin Laden, had come to dominate the
insurgency. Their control extended over vast
swathes of Iraq.

Their ruthless exercise
of power threatened to rip the country apart.
...

For Sheikh Jabbar, desperate times
required desperate measures and this was the
moment he triggered what would become the
Awakening, a military counter-offensive in which
he and his supporters joined forces with their
former enemies, the Americans, to confront
al-Qaeda.

Sheikh Jabbar sought help from
the Americans to break al-Qaeda's hold on Anbar
province. In late 2006, he arranged a meeting
with Colonel John Tien of the US Army in which
he asked for weapons and ammunition for his men
to take on al-Qaeda. The Awakening had begun,
marking a key turning point in the fortunes of
Iraq. Although at the time they numbered in the
dozens, the forces who would later be known as
the Sons of Iraq swelled to a 100,000 or so. [4]

The leaders of the Sunni Awakening in
Anbar Province were the leading figures of their
communities, tribal big shots with extensive local
familial and patronage relationships. They were
also working hand in hand with the US military
occupation, a rather capable killing machine. This
tag-team arrangement helped make the Iraq al-Qaeda
hunt a success.

In a study of the
Awakening published in the Washington Quarterly,
John McCrary quoted the son of one of the Anbar
sheiks:

The Coalition Forces has the very
strong military ability. The civilians and the
tribes, they have a difference that the
Coalition Forces doesn't have. It's that they're
local - they found and know who comes from
outside. They know who are the insurgents and
who are al-Qaeda in general, such that there is
no more al-Qaeda or anything else. You wouldn't
believe me. I'm not exaggerating that in two
months, in two months everything was finished.
[5]

Anbar Province, which resisted US
pacification for four years, became one of Iraq's
safer places after a few months of "Awakening".
The US component of this effort was JSOC, the
no-holds barred assassination initiative. JSOC was
described by Bob Woodward while promoting his Iraq
War book, The War Within:

Beginning in the late spring of
2007, the US military and intelligence agencies
launched a series of top-secret operations that
enabled them to locate, target and kill key
individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq,
the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias,
or so-called special groups. The operations
incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques
and information in the US government.

Senior military officers and officials
at the White House urged against publishing
details or code names associated with the
groundbreaking programs, arguing that
publication of the names alone might harm the
operations that have been so beneficial in Iraq.
As a result, specific operational details have
been omitted in this report and in The War
Within.

But a number of
authoritative sources say the covert activities
had a far-reaching effect on the violence and
were very possibly the biggest factor in
reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90% of the
successful operations and "actionable
intelligence" had come from the new sources,
methods and operations. Several others said that
figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their
significance.

Lt Gen Stanley McChrystal,
the commander of the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al-Qaeda
in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative
warfare," using every tool available
simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human
intelligence and other methods, that allowed
lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent
operations.

Asked in an interview about
the intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq,
President [George W] Bush offered a simple
answer: "JSOC is awesome." [6]

Looking at Syria
through the lens of what happened next door in
Iraq, it would appear that the best way to bring
order to the country would be for a transition
that would reach beyond intransigent but
incapable anti-government emigres to ally
in-country moderate Sunni elements with the
dominant local military force - in this case,
the Syrian Army - and kick off the national
reconciliation exercise by a purge of Salafists.

It appears that there were glimmerings
of a "negotiated transition", aka deal cutting,
with the Assad regime in the early stages of the
SNCORF process but unsurprisingly the maximalist
"Assad must go/no negotiations" approach
prevailed. This is regrettable - at least to
people who would like to see a negotiated end to
the inconclusive butchery - but understandable.

Flip-flops have their
limits
The US and the
West are heavily vested in the "Assad must go"
position. Presumably, the US could only flip-flop
in response to a unanimous declaration in favor of
negotiations by the Syrian opposition, but this
was not to be:

Some of the last holdouts said they
suspected that the agreement was a sly way for
the international community to negotiate with Mr
Assad about a transition to a new government. So
one clause in the agreement specifically bars
such talks. [7]

One might speculate
that the "last holdouts" for the maximalist
charter are not only motivated by overwhelming
moral scruples and/or irrational rage against
ending Syria's carnage by dialogue with Assad;
they are also opposing an attempt to marginalize
and subsequently purge extremist Islamists from
the redefined movement.

Amidst all this,
there was the usual tired effort to shame Russia
and the People's Republic of China into solving
the West's self-created Syria problem by
pressuring Assad.

The PRC's four-point
proposal for supporting the UN peace process was,
not for the first time, shoe-horned into a
West-gratifying narrative of China trying to
repair damage to its global reputation caused by
Beijing's obstruction on Syria at the UN Security
Council. [8]

There are a couple big flaws
in this tale of Western neo-liberalism tutelage of
the morally obtuse PRC. First, since July 2012 the
United States has been exploring the "Yemen
solution", ie Assad hands over power to a
carefully chosen group of supporters and opponents
who perpetuate the status quo albeit in a
modified, more democracy-friendly form. Does
anybody remember Manaf Tlass, the Syrian military
princeling/defector unsuccessfully touted as the
great uniter of the loyal and insurrectionist
opposition this summer? Maybe not. [9]

US
equivocation on its own stance - and drift toward
the Chinese position - not only from four months
ago but also in the days of haggling leading up to
the formation of the SNCORF is not an example or
incentive for a Chinese flip-flop on Syria.

Also, as patient and retentive readers of
Asia Times Online will also recall, the PRC has
been pushing its Syria initiative since early
2012, with the sound, if as yet unrewarded,
calculation that its most persuasive Middle
Eastern role is as the alternative to democratic
chaos for authoritarian governments - aka Saudi
Arabia - and managed democracies - aka Iran - in
the neighborhood: in other words, leveraging its
role as the world's biggest customer for Saudi and
Iranian oil to act as the guarantor of economic
development and supporter of political stability
in the region. [10]

This is a relatively
sound geopolitical strategy, especially since the
United States is successfully weaning itself off
Middle Eastern oil - and the need to share fully
and deeply in Saudi Arabia's local security
anxieties - thanks to domestic fracking and a
coming boom in oil sand crude imports from Canada.

Judging from the journalistic tea leaves,
there is no sign that China is abandoning its
Middle Way strategy in order to act as the West's
clueless trained ape, mindlessly endorsing the
merits of externally promoted regime change to its
own detriment, a role that that foreign observers
for some reason believe Beijing will happily fill
in order to gain the approval of the US and
European Union.

Unsurprisingly, Xinhua's
analysis sniffed that SNCFOR was "dubious",
commented unfavorably on its rejection of
"dialogue", and also reported on some pushback
in-country members of the Syrian opposition who,
Xinhua implies, are more qualified to discuss
Syria's fate that the emigres in Doha:

Luai Hussain, head of the opposition
Building Syria State party, said his party
rejects everything that comes out of the
overseas-based opposition.

"We reject
the formation of any transitional government
abroad and any other decision ... and we regard
such act as direct and real aggression on
Syrians' right to choose their leadership and
determine their destinies."

He said his
party will mobilize Syrian public opinion to
thwart efforts to form a government abroad. "The
formation of any interim government abroad would
be conducive to increasing division in the
Syrian society, and thus would widen the
platform of a civil war," he added.

Along with other leading opponents,
Hussain did not take part in the Doha meeting
apparently because he was not invited. [11]

Xinhua interviewed Luai (who spent
seven years in Syrian prison) in Damascus; while
Western outlets confide themselves largely to war
reporting, war tourism, atrocity journalism, and
deriding the Assad government, Xinhua has stepped
up its in-country presence in an attempt to
promote the visibility and credibility of the
PRC's proposed political solution.

Luai
advocated "international consensus" to solve the
crisis; in Syria-speak, this is the Chinese
position of foreign powers ceasing aid to the
rebels and switching the international focus from
regime change to compelling dissidents to enter
the political dialogue track preferred by Russia
and China.

If, as appears likely, Saudi
Arabia is chafing at the snub administered by
Qatar and the United States, the PRC has a chance
to present itself as the Kingdom's understanding
buddy and redirect King Abdullah's vision toward
economics and his country's future as China's
energy partner. Perhaps Saudi Arabia will decide
its anti-Shi'ite/anti-Iranian crusade has yielded
most of the benefits that can be expected, and it
is time to ring down the curtain on the
extremist-Sunni escapade inside Syria.

However, the idea of imploding Assad's
regime is probably irresistible to Riyadh, and in
any case the window for happy-talk political
solutions is rapidly closing.

Assad's
government has lost control of a lot of territory.
Judging by its increasing reliance on air power,
the government has determined that the battered
Sunni conscripts of the regular army and the
dubious shabiha paramilitaries are not up to the
job of fighting street to street and house to
house to get territory back, and the regime is
mainly interested in denying key assets and
strongpoints to the insurgency by use of jet
bombers and attack helicopters. That's not a good
augury for the city of Damascus if and when the
mayhem moves to the capital from Aleppo.

The initiative in the insurgency appears
to lie with aggressive, opportunistic and
none-too-popular militant outfits, whose efforts
to destroy the Assad regime are frustrated by
suspicious Western governments unwilling to give
them the money, arms, and support needed to finish
the job - and Syria.

Under these
circumstances, a political settlement, however
desirable, seems unlikely unless a major force -
probably not SNCORF, more likely a new Sunni
strongman with a taste for order emerging from the
Syrian army - tips the scales one way or another.

For the United States and the West - which
are primarily interested in finessing their way
out of a Syria mess that they, to a significant
extent, helped create - the end will come soon
enough.

For the PRC, which, for reasons of
energy security, is committed to playing the long
game in the Middle East, bloody chaos in Syria is
just another challenge and opportunity for Beijing
to advance its interests in the world's most
dangerous neighborhood.

For the people of
Syria, it must feel as if the agony will go on
forever.